Why All The To Do About Printed Page Coverage

For year’s copier vendors have been selling pages on a cost per page (CPP) basis without regard to an end user company’s page coverage. In so doing they have been able to achieve nice profit margins that allow them to provide quality service, an easy to understand pricing model, fund growth and provide a fair return to the stakeholders.

With copier unit placements dropping rapidly the traditional copier dealers are now moving into the printer world, bringing with them their CPP model. But many dealers are suddenly talking about page coverage area. After selling pages for years why worry about coverage area now. More important, how do you calculate coverage area? Do you take a month’s worth of samples and send them to a coverage area lab for analysis? Do we calibrate print management sales reps’ eyes to ensure they can accurately calculate coverage area?

I believe there are many players driving page coverage, all with a bias. Statistics tells us that with a normal distribution curve 95% of N fall within two standard deviations. Of the remaining 5 percent, half would fall into the “greater than expected” profit range and the other 2.5 percent would fall into the lower than expected range. Do you usually manage your process to the 2 percent?

Moreover, it appears as if there is more evidence that page coverage is not the big concern it is made out to be. Xerox, in discussing the hybrid pricing approach on their ColorCube 9200, estimates it can bring the average cost of color copies down by 62 percent.

So using my deductive reasoning, since Xerox has stated that a normal color page will be in the range of any other copier, but there will be savings with pages with less coverage, doesn’t is stand to reason that Xerox is counting on significantly more pages having low coverage? That is something to consider.

Here’s the link to this and other information on the ColorCube 9200, which does look like a nice device:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/techchron/detail?&entry_id=39738